Shadows of Duma
846 Words
The moon still carried the echoes of their battle. Benimaru lay unconscious, his body twitching faintly as fragments of flame flickered out from his skin. His sword, Amaterasu, was driven into the silver dust nearby, still smoldering as though even the void itself could be set ablaze.
Xenos stood over him, eyes calm, though beneath that silence, something stirred.
Micron arrived late, his robe fluttering in the low lunar winds. “You didn’t kill him?”
“If I wanted him dead,” Xenos replied flatly, “his ashes would have already been swallowed by the stars.”
Benimaru stirred, groaning. His crimson eyes flickered open feral, yet filled with confusion. His voice cracked: “...Who… am I?”
Xenos crouched, his tone steady. “Your name is Benimaru.”
Benimaru blinked, stunned. “How… how do you know that? Even I ”
“I saw it,” Xenos interrupted. “Not in you. Not in your words. In the threads of possibility themselves.” He tapped his temple lightly. “My precognition allows me to glimpse fragments of names, memories, fates… scattered like broken glass. Yours was clearer than most. You were not meant to die here.”
Benimaru gritted his teeth, gripping his head as if trying to force memory back. “Then… who bound me? Who stole my will?”
Xenos’ gaze darkened. “The Duma Organization.”
At the name, something inside Benimaru ignited his aura erupted in flames darker than night, dancing with streaks of shadow. The ground beneath them cracked, though there was no air, no atmosphere his power simply refused to be contained. His body blurred with a velocity rivaling Wally West, each step bending lunar space as if reality itself stumbled to keep up.
“Duma…” Benimaru whispered, his voice shaking with fury. “I will burn their name from existence.”
Micron tensed at the raw surge of energy. “He’s not exaggerating… he really can.”
But Xenos didn’t flinch. His eyes narrowed, golden light burning faintly in his irises. “Then hear what they’ve done.”
Back on Earth, in a forgotten facility beneath the veins of a ruined cathedral, Xenos led them deep into the shadows. He had traced the psychic echoes of Benimaru’s chains, following them to this place.
Inside, they found the truth.
Children’s bones, scattered. Glass chambers filled with black ichor. Machines grinding prayers into data, feeding sigils etched in blood. A throne of knives where the Organization’s leader sat, smirking as though cruelty itself had taken human form.
“You should not have come here,” the man sneered. “Duma is eternal. Even if you ”
Xenos silenced him by appearing in front of him in less than a blink. His hand gripped the man’s chest not gently, but deep, fingers sinking through ribcage, touching the heart.
His voice was cold as frost, yet each word was dipped in venom:
“I’ll tear your heart from its cradle and force it down your throat while it still remembers how to beat. Then I’ll drag you back from the brink again and again just to feed you the rest of yourself, piece by screaming piece, until even the void forgets your shape.”
And he did.
For hours, the chamber was filled with screams. The man’s soul was broken and rebuilt, only to be shattered again. His sanity eroded, stripped away until nothing but empty howls remained. By the end, there was no throne only blood, dust, and silence.
Xenos stepped back, his gloves untainted as though nothing had touched him.
Benimaru, who had watched, trembled not from fear, but from recognition. “...You’re more demon than I am.”
Xenos met his gaze with an expression unreadable. “No. I’m still a child of God. That is why I can do what others cannot.”
The words struck deep, colder than any flame.
Later, outside the ruins, Benimaru approached him. His sword Amaterasu rested on his shoulder, its blade still whispering embers of destruction.
“Xenos… let me fight with you. I don’t care what happens to me. If this Duma sought to use me, then I’ll burn every last shadow of them until their screams light the sky.”
Xenos studied him for a long moment before nodding once. “Then you’re mine now. Brother.”
Benimaru’s lips curled into a grin one born of rage and relief.
Micron stepped forward, his voice low. “Their archives… before it burned, I saw the ritual. They weren’t working toward mere dominion. They were trying to summon Azrael. The Angel of Death. The End of Everything.”
The words sank like lead into the night.
Xenos turned, walking away from the ruins with his hands in his pockets, his silhouette framed by the flames Benimaru had left behind. He did not look back.
His final words carried like scripture in the wind:
“Wait for me, brother.”
And with that, he walked into the darkness like a sovereign each step a vow, each shadow bending around his presence.
- Writer
